3 Short Paragraphs: Papillon

2017, Michael Noer (Northwest) -- download

I was a big fan of the original in my youth, the movie with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Both movies are semi-biographical, about a Frenchman framed for a murder in the 30s and sent to French Guyana to serve out a life sentence. Neither McQueen nor Charlie Hunnam are really believable as the bold, determined, charismatic Frenchman but their charm carries it off.

I remember the earlier version as more an adventure movie, where a man is pitted against the system and the environment, surviving against all odds. Like most 70s adventure movies, they are never remembered as contiguous stories but as key events. The new one likes to focus on Hunnam's innate animal-ism, likening him to a caged tiger who will escape, it being a matter of time, not circumstances. The events happen, as he mixes it up with friend and co-conspirator Degas (Rami Malek), but nothing really stands out, not even the locale.

If you are going to recreate a critically acclaimed, if no widely remembered, older movie then you need to do something that raises its spirit above the original. But in the end, this movie is so uninspired,  that even the vague emotional connection I have with the original is more tangible than this one. All that I can remember is that Malek and Hunnam were really, really good but... what did they do again? Survive, make escape attempts, survive, fail, finally succeed.